Notes

The first book of The Member of the Wedding sets the mood of the book. Frankie Addams is living the dog days of the summer of her life. She is stuck in the discomfort that exists between childhood and adulthood. She doesnÂ’t fit anywhere and when she realizes this, she begins to long for something unnamable. When her brother comes home with his fiancee to announce their wedding the next Sunday, Frankie finds an answer to her dilemma. A wedding is the most startling symbol of belonging, of two people joining their lives together to make one life, to belong to each other for life. Frankie falls in love with the wedding and wants to be a member of it as if it were a club in which she can fit. In this childlike impulse, clearly futile to everyone but Frankie, McCullers locates all of FrankieÂ’s tortured imagination and longing. In this section of the novel, McCullers seeps the reader in the world of adolescence, a world in which Frankie is curious but gets only hints at answers, a world in which Frankie longs to do and be, but can only long. A world in which no one takes Frankie seriously for any length of time because she alienates them as quickly as she attracts them.

Two times Frankie mentions "lighting out" for some place distant from her home town. The reader should note that at the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn "lights out for the territories" never to be bothered again with what he calls civilization. With her girlÂ’s story, Carson McCullers is certainly commenting on TwainÂ’s boyÂ’s story. Frankie, too, wants to light out, but she immediately considers the problems of where she will go, how she will get there, and where she will stay once sheÂ’s there. Instead of getting to light out, Frankie has to stay put and live with the angst of adolescent powerlessness.

One of the events of FrankieÂ’s summer that throws her into her August funk is that in April, she commits "a queer sin" with Barney MacKean, which makes her hate him and want to kill him. McCullers represents this first sexual encounter as Frankie has experienced it. She has named it a huge and unfathomable sin and she has repressed it as much as possible. She has felt anger and rage about it, but these emotions by August have subsided and she has begun to forget about it. The reader should note that McCullers was breaking new ground in representing adolescent sexuality in non-condemnatory ways. The reader gets the impression that Frankie is being rather too hard on herself for a simple sexual exploration and that it is a shame she doesnÂ’t have anyone to discuss it with.

FrankieÂ’s twin insights in this chapter are first, that she doesnÂ’t belong to any club and second, that Janice and Jarvis are "the we of me." The rest of the novel is FrankieÂ’s attempt to achieve this dream. She changes her name to F. Jasmine Addams.

Table of Contents | Printable Version